Unofficial news and tips about Google

October 21, 2009

Fullscreen Google Tasks

It's not clear why Google doesn't treat Google Tasks as a standalone service: it's integrated with Gmail, Google Calendar, there's an iGoogle gadget and a mobile version, but no standalone interface. The most recent update is that the iGoogle gadget has a canvas view that's displayed when you maximize the gadget.

The gadget lets you create multiple lists, use the toolbar to clear completed tasks or to reorder tasks, sort the tasks by due date and view a list of the completed tasks.

42 comments:

I'm just surprised they've designed Tasks rather than buying Remember The Milk, which already feels a lot like a Google service and integrates pretty well into GMail and Google Calendar (in some places, better so than Google Tasks does).

I disagree with the Remember The Milk. Yes, RTM has a ton more features, but Google Tasks is so much nicer a user-interface experience for adding and editing events, that I highly prefer Tasks over RTM. I'm excited there's a fullscreen version now!

RTM has features but not a good interface. Google Tasks is missing lots of features, but has an okay interface. I much prefer GQueues which has a really nice interface AND a good set of features. You login with your gmail account so you don't have to sign up for anything (like RTM). It intergrates/syncs with Google Calendar, supports recurring tasks, SMS reminders, sharing tasks and has an iGoogle gadget (full screen too).

I was initially a Remember the Milk user, but had a bunch of issues with its Gmail widget slowing down or crashing my browser at one point that I gave up on it and started using Google Tasks, but as others have mentioned, the lack of an alert functionality is a major disadvantage. Sadly, I've taken to setting temporary Events in Google Calendar as a substitute for Tasks, so I can use the notification ability, which is really what I would think Tasks was intended to avoid.

I'm sure RTM has resolved the widget issue, but until they're part of the Google fold, I doubt they'll resolve the problems related to the changing functionality in Gmail that messes up their widget for fairly long periods of time.

Wow, I had not heard of Gqueues until now, and it looks amazing. I've been using RTM for years now, and Gqueues is the first task manager that integrates as well as Google and does things like recurring tasks. I need to explore it more.

As CarLost said above, it would be great if the synchronization was not stupid. When I write something in the phone app without network connection and then later do a sync, then the phone apps' content will be overwritten/deleted with the online content. >:(